Just to be Devil's Advocate; I've heard of John Connolly but not read any - so this synopsis and overview was interesting to me. Surely it's difficult not to do it like this if it's a serial character?

Mike O'Driscoll wrote:-I must be inured to the term because its usage went unnoticed by me. However, if it's the right word for the story - if it's a word that a particular character would use in a given context - then I don't think writers should self-censor.

Mike, the word was in the author's bio, not in a story. Nobody is suggesting that writers should self-censor, and if you read Ali's later post she said that she herself would use the word in the right context. Ditto for Stephen Volk.

About Connolly, I think it makes an interesting change to do something like this occasionally, but only occasionally. In practical terms, it was only possible for Connolly because I had already read most of his back catalogue, and that won't happen often (e.g. I have the three latest books by Laurell K. Hamilton, but have neither the time nor desire to go through the whole Anita Blake back story of fifteen or so volumes). It's not something that is going to become a regular feature - we've only done it once before, with Gary Braunbeck - and the space devoted to the seven previous volumes was only a page and half, a fraction of the whole.

I really liked Hamilton, I did, but anyone else get bored and quickly tired of how powerful Blake was getting? And hey, I'm no prude, but the sex was getting a little dull as well. I thought the first half dozen or so were great fun, and the character development was good, and the will-they-won't-they was well done, but eventually I just didn't care about Blake any more, and that's got to be bad, right?

I read the first Blake and rather liked it, thought it was a gritty urban fantasy, with some nice touches of humour and solid dialogue/story. Not enough to make me go out and get some more though.

Then I got sent "Incubus Dreams" for review, and found the sex and relationship stuff had taken over to the exclusion of almost anything else. In principle I like the idea of a fundamentally straitlaced woman being put in the position where she has to behave promiscuously in order to stay alive, but Hamilton's execution is so coy and smirk inducing on occasion, as with the nightclub Anita hangs at, where all the men wear red t-shirts to signify their willingness to shag her in the event of an emergency

Last one I read was "The Harlequin" and that was much better, and I may check out one of the three I have to review to see how things are moving along.

I've been discussing stories from this issue over at my personal blog, and now seem to have commented on all of them (in effect, comprising a staggered and untimely review of BS #17's fiction), including the Campaign stories.

If anyone is still following this thread and interested, then you can find links to the individual stories here:-

Another blast from slightly further in the past! Black Static #17 from June 2010 is now an e book again. Amazon Prime members can borrow it for free. This issue has Part 1 of Maura McHugh﻿ & Christopher Fowler﻿'s Campaign for Real Fear competition's results. so now both parts of the campaign results, 20 up to 500 word stories, are on Amazon Kindle.

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